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The Data Superiority Wars Take a Semantic Turn

Well known to many is "microtargeting," the practice of gathering data on individual supporters from across a variety of sources, profiling those supporters to identify the right cohort to reach with a given message, and then reaching out — perhaps in selectively placed online ads.

The New York Times' Nick Confessore writes that the successor to Voter Vault, the Republican National Committee's current voter database, will instead "nano-target," whatever that means — Confessore writes only "collecting far more detailed demographic and consumer data on Republican voters than the earlier version" — to the derision of some on the left.